Posts Tagged ‘John Birch Society’

Rupert Murdoch’s campaign to drag the rest of the once-proud Wall Street Journal down to the level of its editorial pages proceeds apace:

Today’s lead editorial, with its graph of “Obama’s Growing Payroll,” is a perfect example of how the WSJ misleads rather than informs. The gist of the editorial is that Obama is presiding over a massive increase of government, exemplified by the surge of civilian employees. The graph shows a striking rise of federal employment from around 1.875 million in 2008 to 2.1 million in 2011. (I reproduce this as Figure 1 below).

The Journal neglects the fact that today’s 2.1 million workers is actually identical to the number of Federal employees in 1981 at the start of the Reagan Administration, 1989 at the end of the Reagan Administration, and 1993 at the end of the Bush Sr. Administration. The numbers went down slightly after that (by around 200,000-300,000 workers as of the late 1990s) with a decline in Defense Department civilian employees, a decline that was probably offset by the rise of private defense contractors (not included in the OMB tables). There is no long-term trend at all. (I show this as Figure 2 below).

As Sorensen goes on to mention, about the only time the Minnesota Teeps duck their heads back into the real world is when they’re arguing for more real-world goodies to be thrown to their rich patrons:

“One of our basic rights is the right to work at a job without having to join a union.”

Somehow, we missed that part of the Bill of Rights. Or the notion of anti-unionism as a fundamental human right. And Bluestem isn’t alone, as this guy’s notions, like an earlier guy’s writing, suggest.